Around Apr 3rd, I was out of town and my fiance cleaned the tank and the filters, and apparently he cleaned the filter cartridges on our emperor TOO well, and cleaned off all the good bacteria (according to LFS). Our tank immediately spiked and by day3 it was obvious the fish were hurting. My puffer curled into a ball, turned really dark and laid on the bottom, or in the corner against the glass. The lion fish laid on the bottom and the only one who wasn't severly affected was the grouper. It took about 3 weeks before any of them ate anything, and then it seemed the puffer bounced back pretty fast, he eats at every feeding now (every other day). The grouper ate at maybe 2 or 3 feedings, and the lion has only eaten maybe 4 of the large frozen crill since this happened.

Once the lion and puffer started feeling better and I thought we were out of the woods, my grouper started behaving oddly. He has been hiding behind the rocks or in his cave for days. He doesn't swim at all (unless I happened to spook him) and he hasn't eaten in at least 10 days. He is dark and he has scrapes on his sides, not sure if its from the rocks or what.

I have been using Garlic Extreme trying to coax the lion and grouper to eat but no luck. In fact my lion just seems to be out of it. He swims around quite a bit, and frequently hangs out up top with his eyes coming up above the surface, like he's looking for food, but when I feed them he doesn't even notice. Crill can float right in front of him and even bump him in the face and he acts like he doesn't even see it. I am getting very worried and don't know what to do. I have asked about them at the LFS at least 5 times and the only thing they said was "do they have parasites?" How would I know? I don't see anything but I don't really know what to look for. I'm about to scoop them all up in a bucket and take them in there so someone who knows what to look for can check them out. If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears.

Did he use any type of cleaning agents when he cleaned the filters? You could have gotten something foreign in the water. My fish acted like that when we got some chemical into the water. Sad to say, but we lost 1 blue hippo tang, 1 blue eyed mimic tang, 1 naso tang, and 2 clowns. I hope you have better luck with your fish. But they too, stopped eating, stopped swimming, and just hid in the rocks. We had to do a 60% water change.